Random thoughts on a variety of things but mainly on learning and teaching…

I just took part in my first Twitter chat. An hour – well, not quite because I missed the start which was a bad move as I was behind before I even started – of fast paced tweeting with so many interesting threads and comments. However, time went fast and it was over before I knew it. I tended to be more of a stalker than a contributor, probably because I was late to it and spent some time catching up, reading tweets and trying to work out what the questions were that everyone was answering! I retweeted and favourited but found that my brain just isn’t really quick enough to think of meaningfull comments of my own! An I am just a little bit scared too! I connect with what one Tweeter said;

“The one thing that has concerned me is airing unformed views that might be misinterpreted. #edcmchat”

I have taken a while to get going with Twitter and with blogging because I don’t feel that anyone else would necessarily be interested in what I think. Why would they? For a long time I wrote my blog but kept it private for that very reason. One day I daringly ventured to tweet a new blog post and a Twitter friend suggested that maybe I should make my blog public because she thought what I had said made sense. That one vote of confidence was an epiphany for me despite the fact that my husband had said all along that I should make it public. (But he is biased!)

Getting back to the point though, I think I have learned over the last year or so, and certainly the last week, that unformed comments have to be made so that people can react, to prompt discussion, to engender debate and as the interaction progresses the ideas take on shape, substance and depth. So what if they are misinterpreted – that just gives you the opportunity to explain and in so doing helps you to think ideas through, it offers different points of view and forces you to think from an alternative perspective.

Thank you to all those people who retweeted my few comments or who replied to them – it is strange how empowering and encouraging that response is.

So, I think I will be more organised for the next edcmchat and more confident about making comments. I am going to make a list so that I can add people to it when I see a comment that I resonate with so that if I need to I can go back to it later. I am going to be brave and go for it!

“Authority is supposedly grounded in wisdom, but I could see from a very early age that authority was only a system of control and it didn't have any inherent wisdom. I quickly realised that you either became a power or you were crushed” Joe Strummer